Why The PBS ‘Do You Think Sarah Palin Is Qualified?’ Poll Is Unscientific

Lately we’ve gotten plenty of emails regarding a certain “Do you think Sarah Palin is qualified to serve as Vice President of the United States?” poll over at the PBS website for news magazine show NOW. The spiel usually goes something like this: “The poll is neck and neck. I’m sorry to pass along a mass email, but this takes about 3 seconds and might save the world.” First of all, do media polls have that much of an impact on how Americans vote that we should give a shit? If so, we’re in trouble because, as witnessed by the chain mail phenomenon, this poll is not in the least bit scientific. In fact, PBS had to rejigger the whole thing after the first 17 days of online polling because people were voting multiple times on the same computer, throwing off the entire count. A letter from John Siceloff, Executive Producer of NOW was recently posted on the site explaining their decision to implement cookies registration (which still allows voters to vote multiple times if they use multiple email accounts.)

So, is the Palin poll now “scientific”? Absolutely not. It is still subject to large scale efforts on the left and the right to mobilize people to vote. The poll has become something of a Rorschach test, a tiny political marker in a tightly contested race. Over the past two weeks, the results of the poll see-sawed back and forth from a majority saying “No” to a majority saying, “Yes”. At the moment the single-voter system was implemented, it was close to a tie: 50% say Sarah Palin is qualified to serve as Vice President, and 48% say no. Those results, in my view, are actually a measure of the mobilization and manipulation efforts by partisans on both sides. Now it will be all about mobilization, and less about manipulation. Blogs on the left and right are circulating viral emails with the exact address of the poll.

By the way, this goes for polls on CNN and USA Today, as well. And, as Siceloff says in his letter, the purpose of these polls is to attract traffic to the NOW website, not to affect how people will actually vote in November. If it does well then we have bigger problems than the results of this poll.

About The Sarah Palin Poll [NOW]